The Death of the Star Wars Universe

Why Millions of Fans Have Felt a Great Disturbance in the Force

Recently, Star Wars fans, along with much of the planet's pop-culture collective, nearly ruptured the internet in their enthusiasm to share set-building photos from next year's long-awaited new feature film.

Han Solo has a granddaughter?

But these weren't shots of just any set. They depicted the construction of the Millennium Falcon.

You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon? It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. It's the modified YT-1300 light freighter that rumbled off a Correllian assembly line half a century before being piloted by that space scoundrel Han Solo. It's the same ship he was flying 50 years later with his granddaughter at his side following the Second Galactic Civil War.

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Wait a minute. Correllians? Second Civil War? Han Solo has a granddaughter? There's a lot more known about that hyperdrive-powered hunk of junk than meets the eye in any Star Wars movie. Thank the Star Wars Expanded Universe for that.

The Star Wars Expanded Universe — or simply the EU, as many fans call it — has been around almost as long as George Lucas's Star Wars itself, which, for the record, turned 37 years old over Memorial Day weekend. While the core Star Wars Universe consists of the six Lucasfilm feature films released between 1977 and 2005, as well as the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie and TV series that followed, the EU includes the characters, creatures, star systems, technologies and, most importantly, the storytelling in novels, short stories, comics, radio shows, video games, amusement park rides, and any other official Star Wars material created over that time.

That same EU fueled a similar Star Wars internet wildfire at the end of April, one lit by Lucasfilm itself as The Walt Disney Company commenced production on the as-yet-untitled Episode VII of the Star Wars films. In a statement on starwars.com, Lucasfilm declared all of the EU creative material as inconsequential and even irrelevant to films yet to come. To be clear, while screenwriters and filmmakers can and may still look back on that material and draw elements of it forward, no creator must adhere to it and, in all likelihood, they won't.

While Luke Skywalker's wife, Han and Leia's three children, tens of thousands of years of Star Wars history before the first Death Star exploded, and about 150 years of adventures afterward — it's all out there, in one form of another — still can be read and enjoyed, no one should expect it to appear on screen.

The announcement swept pop culture in much the same way as the Force informed Obi-Wan Kenobi of Alderaan's destruction by the Empire: Millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror. It's just that those voices were not suddenly silenced. Almost two months later, many passionate Star Wars fans continue to view the announcement as Disney's "eff you" to the EU, feeling betrayed after their devoting time, attention and, let's face it, money to knowing each detail of the universe beyond the films over the course of three decades.

That material never would have been created in the first place had moviegoers not found the original Star Wars so rich in imaginative detail that begged for elaboration. Force-wielding Jedi Knights and 200-year-old Wookiee co-pilots and howling TIE fighters and rolling, bleeping droids — droids! — proved way too cool to be contained by the screen alone for long.

Consider that for the first 22 years of Star Wars being a thing, movie fans could watch a little more than six hours of storytelling, an amount of screen time surpassed by the Harry Potter films released in fewer than three years and nearly equaled by the first two Lord of the Rings films over just two Decembers. Star Wars fans were hungry for more adventures in that galaxy far, far away, and storytellers delivered — just not with more movies.

Star Wars was only a few months into its theatrical run when the first EU story of Han Solo and Chewbacca hit comic-book racks in issue No. 7 of Marvel Comics' Star Wars (the first six issues had adapted the movie, while the seventh pits the Falcon crew against the cunning space pirate Crimson Jack). That winter, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and the droids C-3PO and R2-D2 faced none other than Darth Vader in the original novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster. The next year would see a trilogy of Han Solo novels by Brian Daley, who also scripted National Public Radio's dramatizations of all three original Star Wars films, and the EU was born.

And now, it's gone. Kinda.

Genre fans and pop-culture buffs are no strangers to such decanonization, as it were, of previously established facts and events for fictional characters. Comic-book publishers pull apart and smash together their internal universes with regularity these days. Star Trek fans have been seeing the TV adventures of Captain Kirk and the U.S.S. Enterprise crew re-imagined in Episode VII director J.J. Abrams's feature films for the past five years (even though those films are regarded as occurring in a new time line that protects the nearly 50 years of onscreen Star Trek as still "existing"). Even fans of the primetime TV have witnessed the events of episodes getting swept out of mind as not actually happening to the characters. The 1985–86 season of Dallas, its ninth, became regarded as Pam Ewing's dream by the start of the 10th season, effectively returning Bobby Ewing from the dead. Series finales of shows such as Roseanne, St. Elsewhere, and Newhart left viewers wondering whether anything in the series had happened at all. (Oh: Spoiler alert.)

The prequel trilogy already negated the Hand of Thrawn book trilogy
which, as you pointed out, is the gold standard of the EU. Anybody who
expected the new movies to adhere to the incredibly detailed storyline
of the EU is seriously delusional. Lucasfilm has stated since the
beginning that while they approve of the EU, it's not canon.

I don't buy Disney's claim that the EU was tying down ideas for Episode 7. You meet someone you haven't seen in over 20 years, are you really going to tell them in detail what you did each one of those years?

No. You're going to update them with what you do now and continue on with the story and that's all Disney had to do. So what if Chewbacca goes missing from the new films. If fans wanted to find out why they could read about it. Lando's not in Episode 7 yet I don't hear anyone complaining about that?!

Either way, Disney can do whatever they want to with the franchise. They own the rights. But the EU was the closest they came to making it just for the fans, so when they threw that away, they threw away me as well.

I don't buy Disney's claim that the EU was tying down ideas for Episode 7. You meet someone you haven't seen in over 20 years, are you really going to tell them in detail what you did each one of those years?

No. You're going to update them with what you do now and continue on with the story and that's all Disney had to do. So what if Chewbacca goes missing from the new films. If fans wanted to find out why they could read about it. Lando's not in Episode 7 yet I don't hear anyone complaining about that?!

Either way, Disney can do whatever they want to with the franchise. They own the rights. But the EU was the closest they came to making it just for the fans, so when they threw that away, they threw away me as well.

I don't buy Disney's claim that the EU was tying down ideas for Episode 7. You meet someone you haven't seen in over 20 years, are you really going to tell them in detail what you did each one of those years?

No. You're going to update them with what you do now and continue on with the story and that's all Disney had to do. So what if Chewbacca goes missing from the new films. If fans wanted to find out why they could read about it. Lando's not in Episode 7 yet I don't hear anyone complaining about that?!

Either way, Disney can do whatever they want to with the franchise. They own the rights. But the EU was the closest they came to making it just for the fans, so when they threw that away, they threw away me as well.